


The Cordiality of Death, with his Metallic Grin

by moonlightrhosyn



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, I just think Tosh/Suzie would have been a much more interesting and better choice than Owen/Suzie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26725408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlightrhosyn/pseuds/moonlightrhosyn
Summary: Suzie has always been brilliant with all things metal. A gift she carried through the Rift with her.
Relationships: Implied Suzie Costello/Toshiko Sato
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13
Collections: Torchwood Fan Fests: Bingo Fest 2020





	The Cordiality of Death, with his Metallic Grin

**Author's Note:**

> This fills the prompt "Canon character is an alien AU." The title is from poem 286 "That after Horror - that 'twas us" by Emily Dickinson. Interestingly, it's one of the only three poems she wrote that have the word "metal" or "metallic" in them. (Link to the full poem here: http://markandrewholmes.com/ed_poem6.html)

Her home world, she remembered, had been a planet made of metal. She didn’t remember much else about it - the Rift had stolen her when she was very young. She supposed that was the reason she had been drawn to metalworking, to the smell of iron and the sparks flying and the steam rising up and the shine of it as it was shaped into something new, something beautiful. All her father, who had been dragged through with her, had been drawn to was cigarettes and alcohol. God, how she hated him for it. And he hated her, too - blamed her for them being pulled through, for always going exploring and forcing him to come after her. As if she’d ever wanted him to follow her, when she could flee to the mountains and feel the metal of the world beneath her feet singing in her bones, when she could be alone to  _ think. _ But he always acted like it was her fault that her mother had died and asked him to keep her safe; and he kept her ‘safe’ by keeping her in her room for days at a time and by beating her when he’d had too much to drink. She’d lost count of the times that she’d wished that her knife had come through the Rift with her so that she could have killed him. And some day, she promised herself, looking around her room without a single piece of metal in it, she would.

At school everyone praised her mind and told her she should go to a good university. She went to trade school instead, to study metallurgy. And she was  _ good. _ Everyone was amazed at how naturally it came to her. She smiled and thanked them and told them they were too kind and that she still had so much more to learn, and all the time she felt the metal humming under her hands and she created it anew. And the first thing she made for herself was a knife.

One day, visiting Cardiff again - her father had gone and given himself cancer and the doctors thought she should  _ visit _ him - she felt something as she was walking along the Plass. A strange sort of tingling, like a storm but much, much stronger, was gathering in the air. She turned to the water tower and watched, transfixed, as it lit up with blue streaks of lightning. She laughed, then, throwing her head back and stretching up her arms as if to touch the tower.  _ The storms were like this on my home planet, _ she realised suddenly.  _ I had forgotten they were like this!  _ She stood on the Plass and watched the tower for the rest of the day, long after the lightning stopped. When the first stars started appearing, a man started walking towards her across the Plass. He stopped a few metres away.

“Most people would have gone home after the light show was over!” he called to her.

“Most people would have started running when it first lit up!” she shouted back. “How did you do it? That amount of water should have stopped any electrical impulses sent up from underneath or inside the tower from manifesting like that, regardless of magnitude. I mean, you could have gone really big, but that would have just blown the tower up.”

“Do you really wanna know?” the man asked.

She nodded.

“We used an alien electrical impulse,” he said.

She stared at him. “Are you hiring?”

The man laughed. “I am now. Captain Jack Harkness. And you are?”

“Suzie Costello.”

Torchwood was  _ incredible. _ All the secrets of the universe were open to Suzie now, and she was working in a place that practically hummed in her blood - all the metal jetsam that fell through, and  _ she _ got to figure out what it was! It didn’t occur to her even once to try and find anything in the Archives about her home planet; after all, she had left a long time ago, and what would be the point of looking back now when there was so much for her here? Over time, though, the shine wore off it as she saw the sorts of creatures the Rift typically pulled through.  _ The refuse of the universe, _ she thought bitterly to herself, staring at a dead Hoix,  _ that’s all we get. Nothing beautiful, nothing with any higher purpose or any real power - just the rubbish, as though Earth is some sort of trash heap. And what does that make me? _

Her coworkers kept the darkness somewhat at bay, though. Jack was incredibly knowledgeable about alien machinery that she had to use her intuition to figure out, and about things that even she couldn’t understand. She stared at him sometimes, trying to fathom how he knew these things when she didn’t. He was possibly the first person that had ever made her nervous. Toshiko was wonderful - as brilliant with computers and technology as Suzie was with metal and machinery. Then Owen joined, grieving and frightened and furious (and crying quite a lot on his first day) and almost metallic, in a way - the bite to him, like blood in his mouth or something. Maybe it was just that he handled scalpels so often.

As much fun as they were, and as much as she trusted Toshiko, Suzie was taking no risks. She set programs into the Hub that would enable her to send it into lockdown remotely if she ever needed to escape. After all, she wasn’t going to stay at Torchwood and suffer and die if her father got to escape. She was going to make sure to kill him first, no matter what the consequences were.

And then Jack brought in a dinosaur and a Welshman. Ianto, who was from Torchwood London, who Jack had always - with good reason - despised. Ianto, who practically hummed with metal for some reason. And since Suzie couldn’t afford not to be suspicious, she ran as scan over him for any signs of Cyber-technology. She didn’t find anything, but resolved to keep an eye on him anyway. When she discovered the reason for the humming, she didn’t let Ianto know that she knew, and she didn’t tell Jack. It wasn’t about protecting Ianto, or giving his friend a chance - the feeling of living metal pulsing through the machine that he had somehow built, the metallic almost-taste of the blood pumping through the cyberwoman’s body, was far too interesting for her to let the Captain kill them. And it wasn’t as though she had anything to worry about. The Cybermen weren’t able to kill her with electricity anyway.

One thing about it that did unnerve her, though, was how close the woman was to death. Suzie could sense that too, as surely as she could sense the metal life, and it reminded her starkly of how tenuous her hold on life was now that she worked for Torchwood. She could sense the darkness closing in, and it terrified her.

And then, one day, they were out dredging the bay for something that had apparently gotten in there decades ago, now that Tosh had found a way to lock onto its energy signature or something. (God, but that woman was  _ brilliant, _ Suzie reflected, ankle-deep in the mud next to Ianto.) As soon as he had hauled it to the surface she could feel it, so strongly she almost choked on the taste of it. Heedless of the mud, she dropped to her knees next to the box and prised it open with a knife. As she opened it, she felt the darkness shift and blink out for just a moment and settle back differently. She reached in and picked up the gauntlet, and felt it sing through her blood.


End file.
